The Petch House

Sunday, August 01, 2010

The plastering is officially done! I never thought I'd write that, but yesterday I put a coat of primer on and I've moved on to the stairs.

The stairs.

The stairs have the potential to be a lot of work. It all depends on how far I want to go. I will be stripping off the shellac and re-shellacking. That will be a lot of work, but that is not really the issue. I've found that if I only strip off the top layer and then reapply the shellac, I don't have issues with differences in the finish. In other words, If I take everything back to a uniform point and then bring it back up, there won't be differences in the color.

In this case though, there are places where I need take it back to bare wood, and of course some pieces are being reproduced. The original wood with the 100 year old patina will look different than new wood, unless I revert to stains, which I'm hoping to avoid.

Today I started with a good cleaning of the stairs. Really getting in to the nooks and crannies with warm soapy water. Boy, are there a lot of nooks and crannies in these stairs. Below are some shots of some of the trouble spots that I need to deal with.

Another reason to hate Nazis. This is actually minor. I never even noticed this until I was cleaning today. It is really just in the shellac.

Typical of a banister. This will need to be sanded to bare wood.

Grunge, splotches, and alligatoring. Just strip and re-apply and it should be fine.

“Mag Nasty” Is that from Shakespeare? The worst of the worst. This is on the stringer trim on the second run of stairs. This will need to be sanded out which means the whole piece of wood needs to go back to bare wood.

“LH+JM 4-ever” Forever rotting in hell, I hope. This is just below Mag Nasty. Fortunately this trend of carving in to the stairs ended here. Regardless, the damage is done. Basically, this whole run needs to be sanded down.

Typical of a newel post. It actually looks better in this picture than it does in real life. Still, it is all superficial. Most of those marks will disappear once I strip and reapply the shellac.

It looks like a dog chain or something rubbed against here. This could go either way. It may mostly disappear with a fresh coat of shellac. This is also a good shot of the over-all dingyness of a lot of the finish. You can see the gray tone to the wood above the scratches and below the baluster. This will really come to life with new shellac.

Once the stairs are out of the way the only real big issue with the woodwork in the foyer is the double-front doors. They have their own issues, which I'll save for another post.